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army1987 comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 3: Did the US Government Give Us Absurd Advice About Sugar? - Less Wrong
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Dunno if it's not mainstream enough for you, but FWIW as of now the average rating of The Hacker's Diet on Goodreads is 3.85 out of 5.
I don't think that the Hacker"s diet is a mainstream work. It"s not written by a nutrition professor or by a government health agency but by a tech CEO.
I don't think that says much. The number also happens to be lower than Gary Taubnes Good Calories, Bad Calories.
As far as the Hackers diet itself goes, it preaches to measure weight with moving averages and make decisions based on that measurement.
As far as I know you can't even buy a scale that does moving averages automatically that's how non-mainstream the recommendations of the hackers diet happens to be.
I think if you ask most mainstream health folks what they think about moving averages for weight measurements they have no idea what you are talking about.
In a world where studies indicate that people who weight themselves daily lose more weight, a lot of mainstream health advice recommends against daily weighting to avoid negative emotions associated with seeing your weight.
I see nobody funding a study to see whether a scale that measures someone weight and then gives them the moving average performs against a scale that just tells people their weight directly.
Mainstream nutrition researchers focus to much on food to investigate theories like that.
<nitpick>You can, but AFAICT it costs about an order of magnitude more than one that doesn't.</nitpick>
I don't own one, so I can't be certain.
However I don't see in the page that you linked that Withings can be setup in a way that it never tells you your weight at a particular point in time but only displays the moving average when you step on it.
I would add that once you get rid of the idea that the body scale should display directly what it measures, you can also do things like menstrual cycle controlled weight for woman.
You could also think about simply display the difference between your weight and preset target wait for a particular day. There are plenty of different possibilities to display that information and in a sane world we would compare those difference and run studies to see which way of displaying the information actually encourages humans to make decisions that move them towards their target weight.
That's an awfully specific use mode you ask for. A common mode of use of these scales, which I think is a better choice, is not to look at the display at all, perhaps even covering it. Collecting data should be a habit separate from analyzing data. And when you do analyze data, you don't just want the current point estimate, but the graph of history.
You might be right or you might be wrong. In a sane world someone would run a study to give us data to answer that question.
But we don't live in a sane world. Our mainstream nutrition researchers are not interested in answering that question. They rather fund huge studies that gather self reported eating reports and try to interpret those self reported eating reports to tell us that we should eat certain food over other food.
I'm asking a companies who are in the business of scale production to think about optimal data presentation.
I would want a company like Withings to either make the display fully programmable. Furthermore I would want them to run a study about which way of displaying data is best.
Scientific trial setup:
2000 trial Withings. They get sold with a rabate. Each user who gets them agrees to the trial and that the weight data of the trial is allowed to be published afterwards anonymously.
There are 10 different scales modes. In the first two years of using the scale the user will be logged into the scale mode that supposed to be tested.
After a year is up you go and analyse the data. Which information display was best suited for helping people lose weight? You go and publish that information in a good journal.
Then you go and tell newspaper journalists about your new study which shows that measuring weight in a certain way helps people lose weight. Coincidentally the way to have a scale that displays weight that way you have to go out and by a Withings.
That story is good in the sense that newspaper journalists would probably be happy to write about it.
I would even do a bit of the PR work myself when I do the next QS media interview (I have done >10 in the past).
(Another idea along those lines I once had was controlling for days of the week, as many people eat more on weekends than on weekdays. But the more parameters the model has the more likely overfitting becomes.)
If you make 7 day rolling averages you already remove that effect. In any case from the weight charts that I personally looked at that effect doesn't seem that big. Day to day changes in water content seem to produce more noise.